Introduction by Gabrielle Van Zuylen

The famous couturiers of this century have replaced the Renaissance prices and popes, the kings and nobles of France, the great landowners of the English eighteenth century, the rich of the Industrial Revolution and bankers and mill owners as the innovators and the inventors of form and taste across the world. These men and women come from different countries, different continents, and their influence and vision transforms the lives of all, rich and poor, around the globe. Their eye for line and for life scans, interprets, and forms the world that we work and live in. They fundamentally influence and shape the way we dress, live, and move, and how we see ourselves in time. How logical that their own gardens reveal the sense of their vision—their private world.

The great couturier Cristobal Balenciaga gave his credo after his retirement: "A dress designer must be an architect for the plans, a sculptor for the form, a painter for color, a musician for harmony, and a philosopher to understand measure." His definition of creativity, severely observed during his years of work and crystallized by his reputation, shaped the major figures of today's high fashion. His vision is equally valid for the practice of the art of the garden. The dress designer's art ideally reveals the beauty of the body, its line and movement, in exactly the same way that a great gardener uses the inherent natural possibilities of a site to reveal the beauty of the surrounding landscape.

Hubert de Givenchy speaks for all his colleagues when he states that, "Each article of clothing must become one with every gesture: it's one's life, it is life. Each material is alive." He could be speaking of his gardens, of all gardens. The texture of plants and the architecture of trees are the stuff of all gardens. Color in the garden is the link between the green and brown of the earth and the endless changes of the light in the sky. So what could be more revealing, personal, and fascinating than to see the private gardens of these princes of invention and taste here brilliantly photographed by Claire de Virieu?

Giorgio Armani on the Italian Isola de Pantelleria intensifies the blues of the sky and water with the opulence of light and form. Stephan Janson in Tangier uses these elements for a different purpose, while Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé preserve and intensify the Majorelle garden of Marrakesh. In England, Hardy Amies, the Queen's couturier, has created a cottage garden in a village lost in time, while Anouska Hempel's black swans symbolize the strict strength of plan. In America, Bill Blass has surrounded his eighteenth-century Connecticut house with gardens displaying refinement, elegance, and simplicity. Oscar de la Renta has made a garden of love and memory with his wife Annette beside a magnificent New England landscape. And Kenzo has created a Japanese flower and serenity garden in the Bastille neighborhood in Paris.

To quote Marcel Proust, "By adding here and there a supplementary leaf, I build my work, I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but very simply like a dress."